


When There’s Moonlight, I See Your Eyes.

by CountlessUntruths (KaliCephirot)



Category: I'll Give You the Sun - Jandy Nelson
Genre: Getting Back Together, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 10:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4663236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaliCephirot/pseuds/CountlessUntruths
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is, hidden in the hatch where Noah existed for the past two years, even deeper than that, the smallest, tiniest, brightest little hope that likes to go <em>maybemaybemaybe</em> at him if he thinks too hard about this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When There’s Moonlight, I See Your Eyes.

_He says he’ll be there._

Noah knows he doesn’t have to specify anything else. Less than thirty minutes later, Jude walks inside his room despite the fact that she was on a date with her impossibly-hot-and-British-and-did-I-mention-college-student-boyfriend. Whom they both have seen naked. In no creepy ways, from his part at least. His and Jude’s relationship is still in the mend after two years, and they are so not ready to get to that TMI sharing part yet.

The ‘yet’, though, it feels good to think it. Because it is a yet. Because the Jude that walks inside his room is wearing a skirt and crimson-apple-shapped earrings and bright crimson lips and her eyes are wide as saucers. It’s not hornet-Jude but it’s also not invisible-Jude. A new Jude which he so far likes.

“Oh. My. Clark. Gable,” she grabs his hand, bounces. Fire-retardant-Noah hadn’t allowed himself to think just how much he had missed, bouncing-Jude. He smiles at her– no, grins, feels yellowpurplered nerves. “What did he say? OMCG, Noah! Tell me E-very-thing. ”

“I kinda did,” Noah says, shrugs. “He just sent a one liner saying that he’ll be there, not even a date or anything.”

Jude deflates a little, but then she squeezes his arm and grins at him. “But! He answered, right? That’s important!”

“I guess.”

“You guess? NOAH,” she looks at him before shaking her head, yellow-white-ochre-butterscotch hair whipping around her in a miniature tornado. “Okay, I _know_ I promised to put down the Bible, but we’re going to get serious here. Mad serious. You need a four leaves clover so we’ve to go and find one now, and we should get some sugar and you need an orange and I’ve got some sea red glass that I was going to do a bracelet with but you can have it–”

“Jude, no,” it’s mostly fire-retardant-Noah who says the next words, because the other Noah is still learning his way around again, and he, whomever that is, is still trying to get both Noahs coalesced, maybe, like a collage between one of Chagall’s violinist and Dali’s elephants. But the words still hurt, and jock Noah can say that kind of things with nonchalant is-not-a-big-deal shrugging shoulders, where previous-Noah still feels like crumbling down and sobbing. “We’re not getting back together.”

“And why not?”

Because they were never really together. A few kisses, getting each other off, not seeing each other for over a week, a few more kisses before their not-relationship is not is not together, and he’s pretty sure that relationship aren’t like baseball, you don’t get three strikes and out, and he and Brian already burned through their second chance.

“Because we’re not,” he says simply. “I outed him which, biggest whale-dork-move one could possibly do. It’s not happening. The only thing is that I’ll be able to apologize directly. Maybe he’ll apologize too and then… closure. And that’s it, really. That’s… pretty much what I’ve been wanting to do for two years.”

“Really. Just that.”

He shrugs. “Pretty much.”

Jude looks heartbroken for him which, yeah, makes sense. She just had her fairytale romance happen to her, prophetizied and all. Jude is a resident right now of cloud nine, skipping through life field, no return address at all. That he doesn’t get that makes her do the same face she did when they were four and it was decided that he didn’t have the Sweetwine intuition.

But while Jude might have insisted that he was wrong before, insisted that they just needed some of Grandma Sweetwine’s magic for him, to believe, she just sighs, letting go of his arm so she can lean her head against his.

Smush. It’s still different than before, but it still cells-that-once-where-one-energizing-each-other. And Noah breathes in and out, and Jude does too.

“I’m sorry, Noah,” Jude says instead.

In and out. In his mind, this becomes a picture, blacks and blues and whites, Telepathy, it’s called.

“Yeah. Me too”

**

Invisible-or-not, Jude is Jude, and she still sends him to the forest with basil leaves and a few honeysuckle blossoms stuck in his pockets besides a small meteorite rock that she knows nothing about, and a rib-crushing hug, and Noah doesn’t believe in those things, has never really done so, but he leaves the crushed blossoms and leaves staining his best pair of jeans, because the thing that he didn’t tell Jude, couldn’t bear to tell Jude was this.

There is, hidden in the hatch where he existed for the past two years, even deeper than that, the smallest, tiniest, brightest little hope that likes to go _maybemaybemaybe_ at him if he thinks too hard about this.

Which he doesn’t want to do. Or he wants to, but he doesn’t want to.

Look, it’s complicated.

The point is that he’s still trying Not To Think About Anything regarding this and instead he’s sketching, letting his fingers get used again to the pencil, allowing them to stretch and warm up the way he does at the tracks and Noah wonders if he ought to tell anyone that he survived almost two years without breathing.

“Some things don’t change, huh?”

His head snaps up so fast that he almost gets whiplash. Brian is there, taller than he last saw him, hair longer (and still, shorter than when they first met), shoulders broad, hands deep in his pockets, and he’s kind of giving him this tight, closed lip smile and Noah can’t read him– spent the last two years Not Reading Anyone and he’s pretty sure his heart just stops. Like that. He’s got six minutes to say anything before his brain catches up with him being already dead and all and still the only thing he can do is stand up and look at him and not dare to close his eyes because he’s been standing in this same spot from five to six, sometimes seven, every single freaking day. That’s over seven hundred days of picturing this exact moment and –

–what if he’s making it up again and then he opens his eyes and he’s alone and if he goes back to his email and there’s no answer and maybe he’ll wake up and things will go back to before– bleak, not there Jude, missing-but-there-dad, fire-retardant-hornet-atracting-Noah who is leaking away and away.

But Brian smiles a bit more– less closed-lip-stranger-who-is-angry-at-you and more. Something.

“Dude, you’ve seriously to stop growing, just how tall are you now? Taller than me, that’s for sure,” he shakes his head, looking him from head to toes. His expression goes all weird when he focuses him again, his expression untranslatable, to either jock-Noah or to revolutionary-Noah. “You cut your hair.”

And he sounds so freaking sad about it, and it’s ridiculous that that’s what breaks him, stupid curls and tufts of _hair_ being gone, of all things, which punches him all over– he suddenly has the ghost-memory of Brian kissing him on that same spot, hands on his head, fingers through his freaking hair, kissing him and kissing him and kissing him and he doubles as if punched, feels the stupid freaking tears and he’s word-vomiting again.

“Brian, I’m so, so, sorry,” he gasps, shaking, unable to even see him. “I know you hate me and I get it, I blowed it up, toilet-licking asshatted it completeley, but I am so, so sorry. I wanted to take the words back the moment I said them and I couldn’t and I’m _sorry_ , I know, _know_ you hate me but I am so, so so sorry–”

Noah feels his brain realizing that he’s dead, feels his lungs closing up, not letting him breathe. And Brian is there then, helping him stand up, frowning and looking concerned.

“Hey, hey, Noah. Breathe, okay?” a hand on his face, the other on his chest. “Look at me. We’re going to breathe, alright? Slowly. In, and then out. Good. Again.”

And he’s still so close that Noah can feel the way he exhales, can feel rough, perfect fingers curled on the nape of his neck, and he’s so close that he can count the freckles on his face, the shades of greengoldcopperbrownbluegreen of his eyes, and he keeps breathing with him until Noah thinks he won’t just kill over right there.

Brian doesn’t move away, which he could. Doesn’t stop touching him either, which he also could, and Noah’s hope is chanting its _maybemaybemaybe_ and he can’t take it.

“Noah, the reason I came was to say sorry, too,” he looks up again. Brian’s hand moves from his face, but the other hand hasn’t stopped touching at him, he still has it on his side, rubbing softly. Noah can almost count the number of threads where his shirt is against Brian’s thumb.

“You?”

Brian shrugs, once.  "I also acted pretty dickish. Like, sans the -ish. I was a grade A, supernova level dick, Noah. You were my friend, Noah, and I liked you. A lot. A lot, a lot. And then first I send you all these no-homo vibes the first time, and the second time, days after we have sex, I actually broke up with you without letting you say anything.“ He shrugs a bit, and he looks down for a moment before looking up again. "Like I said. Grade A dick.”

Which Noah had never allowed himself to think fully, not with his whole world crumbling around him, inside him, not with the apocalipsis happening.

“What you did was wrong. But we were both wrong, and I get it that I kinda pushed you into the break down. Not completely, I don’t think, but…”

“The day I saw you, I’d just learned that my mom was having an affair,” Noah says. “And then I saw you and– I crashed. I simply. Black holed.”

Brian is still looking at him, his expression sad. “When your mom died, I wanted to go to you. I wanted to hold you so bad.”

“Wish you had,” he whispers.

Brian steps apart from him, hands go deep inside his pockets. And, Noah knows, with cold, terrible certainty, that this is it. This is all there’s going to be of this. Closure. The end. The portrait of this will be blacks and yellows, light source from the bottom, a tiny little start dimming away into nothing. No faces, the light won’t reach there. Bottom of Pandora.

He pushes his hands inside his jeans pockets too, feels the meteorite and resists the urge to clench his hand around it. Once he and Brian say their goodbyes, he think he’ll simply throw it away. Or bury it for the symbolism.

“Hey, Noah?” He braces himself for it. He looks towards Brian again, and, once more, he can’t read the way he’s looking at him. “You can totally say no. Or, punch me, and you know, I’ll deserve it.”

“I’m not going to punch you.”

“Maybe I’ll deserve it.”

“Still. I’m not going to punch you. What?”

Brian blurts a “Can I kiss you one last time?” fast, which comes out as _canikissonelastme_ , he’s talking so fast, and still Noah got that completely. His heart aches, but he thinks that this is it, this is what he’s been waiting for. The part of him that has been holding on will finally be able to let go. So he nods, one time, and then Brian’s hands are craddling his face and he’s kissing him again. And it’s alchemy, it’s magic, it’s– the last parts of him that were still lost coming back together, jock-Noah and revolutionary-Noah merging and perhaps it was supposed to be a short goodbye kiss, but neither of them lets go. Neither of them seems to want to. He grabs Brian’s hips and brings him closer to him, and Brian pushes him harder against the tree and then he’s pressing Brian’s lips open and Brian groans against his mouth.

And a kiss becomes another, and then another, Brian’s hands under his shirt, his thigh pressing between Brian’s legs, and when they finally break apart Noah’s heart is beating so fast that he thinks it’ll smash through his chest. Brian’s lips look bruised, his pupils blown over like stars. When Brian licks his lips, Noah shivers all over.

Which is perhaps what gets him enough brain cells to say:

“I never stopped thinking about you.”

He’s never seen that look in Brian’s face, that soft, surprised, unbearably touched expression. His smile is a nervous, brief thing on his face. Under Noah’s shirt, his fingers seem to be sending a morse code that he can almost, almost get.

“Could we try again?” Brian asks. “For real, this time?”

The only answer Noah can give, the only one besides the roaring joy surging inside of him, is for him to kiss Brian again. And again and again and again.


End file.
